Gartner Report: Business Outcomes are the Milestones on an Application Strategy Roadmap

As the enterprise world continues to move from multiple store locations to multiple clouds, the call for IT leadership and application owners to work more closely with business owners has become critical. After all, at a digital-first enterprise, those responsible for building and maintaining the digital part of the company need to be involved in strategies for driving business success. And in turn, business leaders need to be involved when application strategies are created.

Naturally, the realization of these two powerhouses meshing perfectly like the cogs of a machine has been slow to come. One of the major stumbling blocks is a general language barrier.

Gartner goes on to explain that the disconnect, unfortunately, is even more complicated than just the words we use. There’s a gap in understanding by application leaders on how their implementation impacts the business.

“Application leaders don’t understand how the various IT requests relate to the business strategy.” They also “can’t define in a business sense what capabilities need to be delivered.”

Success is hard to find when there’s not even a mutually-understood definition of success.

And the issues continue even if an IT initiative does get implemented. As Gartner puts it, “Application leaders don’t have measurable performance goals of the capabilities being delivered to determine if the effort was a success.”

And when IT can’t show success, it puts a lot on the line, including funding for future initiatives.

It’s On Us

According to Gartner, to solve the issue, application leaders need to adopt and fully understand new, business-centric metrics. We believe that will get business leaders nodding with familiarity and excitement. Gartner calls these essential metrics business outcomes —a specific and measurable target action that is taken in response to a business direction or disruption. Simply put, the business benefits that will result from a particular IT initiative. These business-centric leading indicators can come in the form of cost-benefits, increased revenue, or improvements in customer experience. The bottom line is pretty much the bottom line. But it can’t stop there. Application leaders need to then be able to prove that the desired outcome was (or was not) attained using these same business outcomes.

In high-production environments where release cycles are measured in hours or minutes — not days or weeks — there's little room for mistakes and no room for confusion. Everyone has to understand what's happening, in real time, and have the means to do whatever is necessary to keep applications up and running optimally.

DevOps is a high-stakes world, but done well, it delivers the agility and performance to significantly impact business competitiveness.